Google Wallet

For whatever reason, the Kit Kat update for the LG G2 on AT&T left out Android 4.4’s Tap & Pay settings menu, even though the device should have no problem using Host Card Emulation to make mobile payments. There are work-arounds, for sure, but most involve sideloading hacked Google Wallet apks or flashing a custom ROM. For those who were expecting the functionality out of the gate, life has been a bit frustrating.

Things are changing today, thanks to an update that AT&T is pushing to the G2. The changelog is minimal, but does say specifically that it involves “updates to Google+ and Google Wallet.” At least one reader has already confirmed that Tap & Pay is now working. (more…)

Just a quick heads-up to those of you still using Google Wallet, but own a device that doesn’t have Kit Kat (Android 4.4+). Google is going to kill off Tap & Pay functionality come April 14 for anything below Android 4.4. In other words, you will only be able to store loyalty cards and offers, send money to friends, view orders, and use the physical Google Wallet card to make purchases. OK, that’s most functionality, just not the Tap & Pay portion.

They began sending emails out last night to notify users who meet the 4.3 and below criteria and have also updated their Wallet support pages. (more…)

An update for Google Wallet was announced by Google today, which brings a new feature called Orders. With Orders, users of Google Wallet who make online purchases will have an easier time tracking their purchases. Not only the purchasing aspect, but the actual shipping and delivering of your purchase as well. (more…)

When Google introduced Host Card Emulation (HCE) with Kit Kat back in November, some of us looked at the move as them flipping the bird to Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile, along with their Isis Mobile Wallet application. For over a year, companies like Verizon refused to allow Google Wallet to work on their phones, denying that it had anything to do with their investment in Isis and everything to do with the app trying to access a phone’s Secure Element (SE). With HCE and Kit Kat, that need to access a Secure Element was removed, meaning there was no longer a way for mobile payment services to be blocked. HCE quickly became the future of mobile payments, something MasterCard and Visa are now fully behind. (more…)

I wish I could say I used Google Wallet to pay for stuff regularly, but because my encounters with NFC payment terminals are infrequent at best, I have to rely on plastic cards way more than I’d prefer. I have, however, relied on the app’s loyalty card storage a couple of times, but entering the information by hand was such a chore. Thankfully, Google is about to make things a little easier by incorporating a new scanning feature into the Google Wallet application.(more…)

Yesterday, we first spotted signs of the arrival of a physical Google Wallet card, even providing you instructions on how to order you own a few hours before Google made it official. This morning, they pushed out a Google Wallet app update (build 2.0-R141-v14) to support those cards that we all ordered, making it easy to spend your Wallet cash balance in the more traditional sense without your phone or app. The update also makes it easy to add new credit cards by scanning them with your camera. You could argue that this is the best part of the update, as there is nothing more tedious than manually typing in credit card info.

A few months back, rumors of a physical Google Wallet card surfaced, suggesting that Google would give you a credit/debit card that could access your Google Wallet balance and be used for purchasing goods. We waited and waited, expecting it to show up at some point as a single card you could use in your wallet since Google Wallet the NFC mobile payment service had yet to take off. For whatever reason, it never did arrive – well, until this morning. One of our readers was prompted with an option to order one, which led us into digging a bit more to see if the service was really live. Turns out it is. We’ve already ordered ours.

We just got done installing Android 4.4 Kit Kat on our Verizon Moto X and realized after setting up Google Wallet that it wasn’t showing up in our Tap & pay section. We also weren’t seeing the option to be able to “tap and pay” in Google Wallet like we were sort of expecting once running 4.4. We mentioned in our quick overview that Google may need to push out an update to Google Wallet to get it to work with Kit Kat devices outside of the Nexus 5, since the N5 is running a newer version of Wallet than is currently available on Google Play. (more…)

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